Shutting Down (Pre-Revenue)

I created Cita Madre to help improve the (currently painful) process of finding appointments at Mexican Consulates. Unfortunately, I have come to the realization that the people in control of the process do not want it to be improved, so I have decided to stop working on Cita Madre.

Reflection

Obviously this is not the outcome I hoped for. To make matters worse, I ended up taking too long to add payments, so I wasn't able to validate the monetary demand. Also, in the short time the app was functional, I wasn't able to get myself an appointment.

However, I'm glad I worked on this project, for so many reasons:

• It got me excited about building things again
• I got to flex my “launch” muscle: from idea to real users in around a month (far less time than my previous projects)
• I helped some real people with an annoying problem
  • Over 1000 total visitors (92% paid, 8% organic search)
  • Got as high as 65 visitors per day
  • 19 mailing list subscribers
  • Helped a bunch of people over email
• Learned new skills / tried new tools
  • Web scraping
  • Nuxt / SSR
  • Render
  • Postgres
  • Product analytics (Mixpanel)
  • A / B testing
  • SEO (Ahrefs, Google Search Console)
  • CPC Advertising (Google Ads)
  • Transactional email (Postmark)
  • Mailing list creation (Convertkit)
  • Practiced my Spanish

I also gained a lot of strategic knowledge, which will hopefully help me be more successful in the future. Some key takeaways:

• Try not to build on a platform
• If you do build on a platform, make sure it’s a symbiotic relationship
  • Never build on a potentially hostile platform
• Validate demand (ideally with real money) as quickly as possible

What's next?

Instead of fully shutting down the site, I'm planning to leave it up as-is (at least for a while). I think this is better than shutting it down immediately, because this option maximizes future optionality: Maybe one day I'll want to try again, or I'll decide to pivot it into a niche content site. In the meantime, I'll invest my time in investigating and trying out other ideas. If I gain more experience and end up thinking this idea is the best one, I can come back and try again.